Research, development and demonstration of an innovative online monitoring system for water contaminants in shallow ground water.

The overall objective of the DIWA is to research, develop and demonstrate an innovative online monitoring system of water contaminants (primarily pesticides) in shallow ground water and public/private water wells. As emphasised in various popular literature and scientific journals contamination of water by pesticides is a serious problem experienced in many places. E.g. in NO pesticides are most frequently and in highest concentrations found in shallow ground water, where 27% of the 190 samples exceeded the drinking water limit for total pesticide concentration, and 158 detections of single compounds exceeded the drinking water limit of 0.1 lg/L. In DK pesticide detections has grown from between 25% and 30% in the period 1998 to 2004, increasing from about 39% in 2010, with a staggering 14% above the maximum admissible concentration (MAC), which is an increasing trend. As a result, there is a need to develop a system of distributed sensors for water contamination of pesticides, this is apparent in NO and DK, but in general in countries engaged in agriculture. As an example DK is on average losing 100 drinking water wells per year due to pesticide contamination; our envisaged DIWA project will provide an early warning system when, a well is nearing MAC, allowing for corrective measures to be taken or to plan replacement or redundancy in the water supply. Initially we will target NO and DK as our home markets, small markets where we can introduce and mature our products and services, prior to introducing the device to the wider EU market. This will enable us to prepare scaling of production and services, as well as generate needed cash flow and finances for the large investments needed for introduction into the larger markets in DE, FR, ES and IT. With a market penetration of 10% in our home market 3 years post project, we will have an accumulated revenue of EUR 24M, with an estimated margin of 20%, resulting in a profit of EUR 4.8M.